Islam chose me: Susan Carland on religion, love and the hijab

Modesty is not a word that comes up in everyday conversation for most Australians. But it is an idea under constant scrutiny for Susan Carland, a long-time Muslim convert and an increasingly sought-after public intellectual, beauty and wife of the even more visible Gold Logie-winning TV presenter Waleed Aly.

Tying the laces of her black patent leather shoes at the end of a photo shoot for Sunday Life, she says: "For Muslims it always comes back to intention. The more you're in the public eye, the more you have to ask yourself, 'Is my intention because I want to be on the front of a magazine and I want everyone to look at me?' If so, then, that's problematic.

Susan Carland and her husband Waleed Aly whom she met when they were both teenagers. Photo: Getty Images

"But if your intention is sincerely, 'I don't particularly enjoy being in magazines but I have the intention of trying to create a more cohesive society or a society that has some nuance in this conversation about Islam...' I don't think I'm particularly good at public speaking, but if people say, 'Please come and talk to us,' I feel uneasy about saying no and then complaining about the level of public conversation."

Carland and I meet at a Sydney photographic studio in the week that controversy is boiling over the short-lived burkini ban in France, where police were photographed forcing a woman to remove her long-sleeved top on a beach.

For Carland this is "that old thing of women's bodies being used as a battleground for - generally men's - political conquests. I see the other side of women being forced to cover up in some countries as just as problematic." She was pleased by the reactions of disbelief and outrage from many Australians, "a reassuring sign of how generally Australia accommodates or champions multiculturalism".

Carland pays a price for her public profile, attracting abuse on Twitter that she deals with by pledging a dollar to UNICEF for every hateful comment - about $4800 so far, with half donated by supporters. But with a daughter, Aisha, 13, and son, Zayd, 9, she is as likely to tweet about children's games or snot-eating as about refugees or racism.

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Carland has risen before dawn in Melbourne to fly here for the hours of make-up and dressing required for a cover shoot so she can be back in time to pick up her son from school as the babysitter has just resigned. She is good-natured and playful about the fiddly process ("I'm walking like a horse," she says, laughing as she clumps around in a pair of boots), although she insists she is ignorant of fashion, refusing to look at the photographer's radiant portraits ("I'm so unphotogenic," "I look like Princess Leia!") and swears she never reads about herself. As Aly says, "She is charmingly self-deprecating."

The designer clothes have been chosen to cover her arms, chest and legs.

But the first thing people notice about this graceful 1.8-metre former ballet student is that she wears hijab, so I ask if I can watch her arrange one of her scarves. Having run fashion shows on how to wear hijab, Carland demonstrates how her hair is held back by a stretchy non-slip tube and the ways a scarf can be draped under her chin or twisted and pinned into a turban.

Carland realises she stands out in modern society, where "the currency is very much exposed flesh and 'pay attention to me' - and that's fine if people want to do that, that's their prerogative. But I see a lot of wisdom in the Islamic value of modesty in terms of behaviour and dress. These are very much decisions people have to make for themselves and neither can be enforced."

Back in her own clothes, she wears fashionably tight navy pants, white shirt, grey jacket and grey cotton scarf. As a convert to Sunni Islam at 19, she made the choice to cover her head as "an act of worship" and at 37 says hijab fits easily with her feminism.

"I don't find wearing hijab restrictive: I teach at university, I go on TV, I go swimming, I used to go roller-blading - a '90s activity - I go travelling, I've gone scuba diving at the Barrier Reef a couple of times. So the only thing I think holds me back is people's negative stereotypes and assuming what I am, or can or can't do, or [how I] feel about things. The whole point about hijab is it was meant to facilitate mobility in society."

I don't find wearing hijab restrictive: I teach at university, I go on TV, I go swimming. The whole point about hijab is it was meant to facilitate mobility in society.

Rather than limiting her career, Carland's religion bolsters her progress as Australia looks to educated, articulate, well-reasoned representatives of Islam. It would be hard to find a better double act than the handsome Carland and Aly, who sat with Malcolm Turnbull when the Prime Minister hosted a dinner at Kirribilli House during Ramadan in June.

They are a power couple now, since Aly's rapid evolution from lawyer to political academic, Fairfax newspaper columnist and co-host of Channel 10's current affairs show, The Project, and Radio National's ethics program, The Minefield, but Carland was first to have a media profile. As Australian Muslim of the Year in 2004, she spoke out against terrorism and for Muslim women in interviews that didn't even name her husband, and is now a TV regular on ABC News Breakfast and a frequent corporate speaker.

This year, with a new PhD in sociology, Carland is lecturing first-year students at Monash University's National Centre for Australian Studies. Professor Bruce Scates, director of the centre, credits "this quite remarkable individual" with helping to double the number of undergraduates in the course. Among a stream of compliments, he says she is "a good team player who is able to galvanise interest across the faculty to talk to her class" and "celebrates diversity".

"When you speak to Susan an integrity shines through, a deep sense of social justice, compassion is woven through her. She's a brilliant teacher - the kind of teacher who changes students' lives; she inspires and brings out the best in them. In 40-odd years of university teaching I don't think I've seen anyone with more potential."

Carland acknowledges (but laughs off the credit) that her "Introduction to Contemporary Australia" course has grown from 80 to 200 students, mostly from Europe, Britain and the US, and says she aims to explain the history behind current issues so international students can understand why, for example, asylum seekers are controversial or someone throws a banana at an Indigenous football player.

"She's willing to try different things and isn't frightened of change," says Scates, who has involved her in researching a series of educational videos, Australian Journey, based on objects in the National Museum of Australia collection. For a story inspired by Captain Cook's cannon, which was on the Endeavour when it ran aground, Carland was filmed scuba diving and discussing climate-change damage to the Great Barrier Reef.

She is also finishing a book based on her doctoral thesis, Fighting Hislam ("I sometimes think the title is the best part," she jokes), for which she interviewed female theologians, activists and writers in Australia and overseas about how they oppose sexism in the Muslim community.

"There is such ignorance, people are shocked that there are even women doing this," she says. "Right from the beginning women, have been using Islam to argue for their rights, saying to men, 'Hang on, our religion doesn't say you can do that.' Especially outside the faith, people see Muslim women as these passive victims who do whatever their husbands say, or whatever their imams say, or their fathers say. Nothing could be further from the truth."

There is nothing passive about Carland in her marriage of equals or her life choices. Raised in a Christian household in suburban Melbourne, she moved from the Uniting Church to the evangelical Baptist Church as a young teenager and at 17 became intellectually curious about Islam, which she found was scholarly and humane rather than barbaric, before seeking out a Muslim women's group at university and converting two years later.

She was bored at church as a child but developed a strong need for religion "about the same time I began to have questions about life, the universe, what it meant to live a moral existence and where we are going - the same age when teenagers often become vegetarian or concerned with ethics and morality. It did feel that I had made a rational and personal choice as opposed to this is my culture or what my family says."

Saara Sabbagh, the Syrian-born founder of Benevolence Australia, a Muslim community organisation, has been Carland's best friend since they were young and single.

"I was attracted to her kindness, her authenticity," Sabbagh says, listing Carland's charitable works as a volunteer, in fun runs, buying ethical gifts, fundraising for children in Swaziland. "Susan has a very analytical mind and she will question and allow me to question my own traditions. I love that."

Carland and Aly met through a friend as teenagers and often spoke on the phone but she says he wasn't interested in her questions about Islam. It was only after her conversion that they started going out and when he became too keen she told him he was the last man she would marry.

"He just really annoyed me," she says. "I think maybe it was that I'd become Muslim so I was dealing with all those changes in my life, telling my family and friends, and I needed everyone to give me some space."

Fourteen years after their marriage Carland says, "If anything I love him even more and I feel even closer to him and even more committed that he's the right person. I adore him."

Aly speaks adoringly about his "best friend" for an hour on the phone. "She's a very charismatic, magnetic person; she's bright, outrageously good at conversation and really funny but with a lightness to her. She's a very easy person to be around and she's like that the first time you meet her," he says, though he recalls her hurtful rejection.

They connected, Aly says, not so much over big issues as small ones, such as their love of British comedy - despite her preference for The Young Ones and his for the more "sophisticated" Blackadder. Carland's fixation with Rik Mayall, who played a sociology student in The Young Ones, inspired her to become a sociologist, he says. They also enjoy "nerdy dictionary games", says Sabbagh.

When I push the two on what they disagree about, Carland says time - she's punctual, he's "relaxed" - and Aly says housework - she's tidy, he has "a laissez-faire attitude". The family are Richmond AFL supporters but Aly says Carland "finds the amount of mental energy I devote to sport insane". She's a morning person, starting with a run or the gym, and he often works into the early hours. Also, he says, he is snobbier about music while she's a more voracious reader. (Sabbagh says, "She can read even when cooking.")

The couple often have their best conversations over brunch during a gap in their working days and each finds the other a trusted sounding board. "We'll just sit there and talk about politics or terrorism or feminism or whatever, and thrash out these ideas," Carland says. Not the topics most couples discuss at brunch. "We also have conversations like, 'Can you please put those clothes in the dryer, they smell mouldy.' "

Their children are the focus at home. Zayd is at a school for autistic children and is going through a delicate phase of being super-competitive at sports and games, and upset at losing. But Carland describes him as "a delight - an average kid, chatty, funny, makes jokes, wants to look for Pokémon on my phone". Since having children, she says, she's become an up-to-six-a-day coffee drinker. "I've fried my endocrine system so thoroughly I can lie in bed and drink coffee."

Carland's mission seems to be to defend Islam as a religion of values applicable to contemporary life, and to demonstrate that Muslims are just people, too. She remembers watching the World Trade Centre attack in 2001 on TV as a student, three years after her conversion, and thinking, "But how can Muslims justify that? Even I knew enough to say that's not allowed."

She sometimes wonders what her life might have been like if she hadn't embraced Islam. "Would I have been a corporate executive, a stay-at-home mum, would I even be married? I have no idea about any of that."

But she doesn't second-guess her choice. "The 'problem' for me is that I genuinely believe Islam is true. I sincerely believe that this is the right religion for me," she says, still clear and patient as she runs to catch her plane. "There's so many reasons not to be Muslim in this world but I feel like Islam chose me, so I couldn't walk away even if I wanted to." •